The English Graduate Student Organization at the University at Albany(SUNY) seeks papers for its annual graduate student conference that isbeing held in April in conjunction with a visit by and conference onHélène Cixous, the world-renown French feminist scholar, novelist, andplaywright. This year's topic, "What does it mean to read in the 21stcentury?”, is inspired by Cixous' politically-charged work across variousgenres. The conference will explore an array of questions relating to thereading of literature today.

It seems that we live in an era where reading advertisements and tabloidshas become just as important, if not more crucial than, what has come tobe known as the canon. Today, there is a large public who choose not toread literature (in the classical sense) at all – literacy withoutliterature, but with Internet, television, advertisements, magazines,tabloids, etc. It can be argued that very little of our reading today isof the 'literary type' as it was understood in previous centuries (asrecent as the 'literary type' of readings performed by New Critics). The21st century finds us reading after the text has opened its borders tocountless interpretive modes. Contemporary critical theory has shown thatno reading occurs in isolation - the same theories and ideologies equallyinform the novel and television advertisement. Whether the act of readingtakes place in seclusion or in public-under a reading lamp in one's studyor on a train whirring past a billboard, the moment of reading is alwaysinfluenced by cultural conditioning and social and linguistic theorizing.The result is that theory, ideology, and politics emerge today in placeswhere they may not have before. The Victorian novel has become mired in aMarxist critique of bourgeois ideology, the daily newspaper candeconstruct itself, and “language poetry” purports, in many ways, to be"theory," leaving us to reconsider the definitions of literature. We arebegged to ask, "What is literary in the 21st century?"

Papers on the following topics will be reviewed for consideration:

o Can we treat literature as theory unto itself?

o How does living in the 21st century affect our practices of reading?

o How do pop-culture phenomena condition us to read throughout our lives?

o How do literary trends like celebrity authorship, book clubs, popularnovels, web blogs, etc., affect our conception of the “literary” and theprocess of reading itself?

o In what ways has post-structuralism contributed to the notion of beingpost-literature?

o How do we teach literature in the 21st cenutry?

o Are current educational standards and methods compatible or antitheticalto the requirements of approaching the “text” in this manner?

o What is the role of English Departments in investigating thepost-literature question?

o How does genre fit into the question of reading in the 21st century?

Please submit a 250 word abstract to egsoalbany_at_yahoo.com by January 15.